


Keeping Up Appearances

by karelian



Category: Actor RPF, Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Community: contrelamontre, Crying, Gen, Illnesses, Race, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-05-03
Updated: 2003-05-31
Packaged: 2017-10-13 06:17:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karelian/pseuds/karelian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John tries to avoid public displays of emotion and Sean doesn't like what the casting says about the producers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tears

**Author's Note:**

> Two ficlets written in response to fannish controversies. They're too didactic to count as proper fic.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John tries to avoid public displays of emotion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I got tired of the "real men don't cry" argument regarding slash fic. Maybe there are men who never cry, but I have no desire to meet them. Very loosely inspired by an article on a boy with leukemia visiting the studio.

Peter invited a little girl who was dying of cancer to the _Two Towers_ reshoots. To everyone's surprise, Gimli was the person she most wanted to meet. To no one's surprise, John found excuses to stay away from the set, pleading illness in the morning, hiding in makeup in the afternoon.

Sean Bean offered to take the pale, waif-thin girl and her parents around, though she was a little bit afraid of him when she met him in his costume. Yet she was brave and polite, smiling shyly and saying that he sounded different than Boromir when he told her about his three little girls at home. After discovering that she liked the Spice Girls too, Sean got so choked up that Peter had to hustle him away, explaining earnestly to the child that Sean was still upset about Boromir trying to take the Ring from Frodo.

While the girl and her family went off with Peter, Dominic and Billy, who were working on the expanded Fangorn scenes, Sean sat outside one of the sound stages and wept. This was not unexpected, for Sean had few qualms about crying in public. He had been in tears in front of the entire Fellowship talking about his divorce, and had bawled at his farewell party when _Fellowship_ was finished. Ian and Miranda had made him cry just the other day during an improvisational performance of the end of _King Lear_.

It had surprised John that an Englishman famous for playing action heroes cried more easily than anyone else in the cast, though he didn't know why that should startle him given how much crying Sean had done in some of his films. But that was acting. It wasn't the same as weeping uncontrollably in front of his colleagues, which was embarrassing for everyone. John could cry on cue, and did, more than once, in the _Lord of the Rings_ movies, but he felt distressed about the idea of meeting a little girl who could probably make him cry in front of everyone just by talking to him.

John wasn't sure why he felt this way, especially in New Zealand among this group of people. There wasn't a single member of the cast he hadn't seen crying at some point in the past few years. Orlando would get homesick and cry on Liv's shoulder or Billy's when Liv wasn't around. All four of the hobbits were emotional, particularly Elijah who often cried watching raw film footage with terrible sound. Sean Astin kept things closer to the chest than the rest of them, but he would get homesick and moody too.

This cast had been chosen for its expressiveness. Even Viggo, who was in some ways an intensely private person, could break down in a storm of public tears, as he had done shooting Boromir's death scene. Today he was sitting with Sean, trying to comfort him, and just about everyone who passed them nodded understandingly, perhaps approvingly. And why shouldn't they, when that poor girl was dying and her parents were taking her around with strained smiles on their faces -- it was enough to make anyone cry.

"Are you hiding?" Orlando had found him, and John cringed inwardly -- Orlando who often had less tact than most of the others, being young and using bravado to compensate for any lack of confidence. "You're allowed to be gruff to her, you know. She thinks you're a dwarf."

John stood to remind Orlando that he towered over almost everyone, even him. "I don't want to scare the poor child to death. I'm sure that after Gimli, I shall be a great disappointment." He spoke without self-deprecation, but the young man gave him a piercing look. "She doesn't need to see a depressing old man. I'm surprised -- I thought all the young ones wanted to meet the elf."

"Legolas," said Orlando slowly, "is going to live forever. Maybe she doesn't think she has a lot in common with him. And you make her laugh."

"I don't know if I can make her laugh. I certainly don't want to make her cry."

"You won't. She wants to meet you. Though who knows why, really." Orlando flashed John a grin. "Nobody cries more than Sean, anyway. Be glad you never had to take a chopper with him. Do you want to hold on to my knee through this? I'll come with you if you want."

So Orlando knew why John didn't want to meet the girl. That struck John as being nearly as humiliating as public tears, yet strangely enough he drew strength from it.

"Thank you," he said humbly, wishing not for the first time that he were as young and self-possessed as Orlando. Or as candid as Sean, who seemed more discomfited by crude jokes than genuine displays of feeling.

Refusing to cry in this case, John thought, might be a grander show of weakness than tears.


	2. White Movie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Denzel Washington could have played Aragorn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the contrelamontre "white" challenge. 32 minutes.

"New schedule again," Elijah called out to the others when he returned to the set from lunch. "No news though." Since Stuart Townsend had been dismissed, they had been shooting for two days without an Aragorn, and Elijah was the most overtly bothered by the situation.

"You know who'd be great?" Sean Astin said suddenly. "Denzel Washington. Did you see _Glory_ , or _Cry Freedom_? He's the right age, and he has that incredible screen physicality."

"Yeah," said Elijah slowly. Nobody else said anything at all.

"What? There were no black people in Gondor?" Sean asked, rolling his eyes as if he thought it were a joke. Then he turned serious, thinking about it, and picked up _The Return of the King_ , flipping through one of the appendices.

"They're going to make this entire epic without a single ethnic actor in a major role," he guessed.

"I'm an ethnic actor," objected Billy with a quick grin, drawing out his vowels to emphasize his accent. "Look at this cast. There are people from all over the world. In the crew..."

"Playing orcs," Sean said flatly. "Wearing masks. Stunt doubles. The only dark skin onscreen belongs to the bad guys. D'you think they brought in Avery Brooks to read for Elrond? He could do it -- he's got that voice that makes you stop and pay attention. They could have cast dark-skinned actors for all the Rivendell Elves, or the Mirkwood Elves, or the Lothlorien Elves. They could have cast an Asian actor as one of us."

"But the story's English," said Dom. "The Rohirrim are supposed to be Vikings or something, right? And the Shire's like where Tolkien grew up, and the Dwarves..."

"...are all white," Sean interrupted. "And the wizards are all white. And the hobbits are all white, and the Men are all white. Do you think anyone stopped to ask whether it could be done differently?"

"James Earl Jones as Saruman would have been too _Star Wars_ ," said Elijah lightly, trying to shift Sean's mood. "Look, there's nothing we can do about it anyway. They're going to cast who they're going to cast."

"In everything," Sean agreed. "That doesn't make it good for the movie, though."

"None of us are arguing," said Elijah. "But I don't think you can say the producers are racist. They cast an openly gay man as Gandalf..."

"Openly gay knight," Sean nodded. "White wizard. Pretty ironic. I'm not saying the producers are racist. I'm saying the industry is racist. We're making a white movie."


End file.
